Some squinting will be required to block out the race and class stereotyping, as well as the puddles of sentiment scattered throughout the highly predictable plot. Yet Jon Hartmere’s script has genuinely funny moments and is blessedly short on crassness.

In prioritizing Crowhurst’s psychological frailty over his physical challenges (both conveyed more evocatively in the excellent 2007 documentary “Deep Water”), Firth and his director find something quietly touching, even soulful, in the character’s wretchedness. In this somber tragedy, the real demons are never anywhere but right inside that boat.

Erik Molberg Hansen’s relaxed camera movements and fuzzy-soft compositions are quite beautiful, and the performances — including the superb Trine Dyrholm as the baby’s Danish foster mother — are pitch-perfect. Best of all is the magnetic August, whose open, mobile features can slide from plain to lovely with just a shift in the light and whose embrace of the character is a joy to watch.

Rich in information and dense with quiet outrage, Shraysi Tandon’s debut feature, the investigative documentary Invisible Hands, jumps into the murky and shameful world of child trafficking and forced labor.

While the movie is rightfully more interested in lauding her bravery than highlighting her sometimes abrasive personality, these small moments help to humanize a portrait that can at times seem more awestruck than enlightening.

Using real experiences shared by the homeless in story workshops, Omotoso — who was also a creator of the South African television series “A Place Called Home” — directs with empathy and without sentimentality.

Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.

Programmatic and groaningly trite, What They Had, the debut feature from Elizabeth Chomko, would be impossible to swallow without its star-studded cast. Even so, it requires all their considerable skills to stop this soapy family drama from sliding into complete banality.

Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study.

This isn’t a wisecracking, tongue-in-cheek picture: Green wants us to believe in his Bogeyman, and Curtis is his ace card. Leaving no room for winks or giggles, she makes Laurie’s long-festering terror the glue that holds the movie together.

Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.

Reports of excessively punitive training of female gymnasts surface with some regularity, so in that sense Over the Limit is not unexpected. But the Polish director Marta Prus, brilliantly constructing a very particular look at a sport in which the arch of an eyebrow is as important as that of a spine, remains coolly impassive.

Suffused with a sentimentality that Wilde himself would have deplored, The Happy Prince is narratively mushy and meandering. Yet, beneath the prosthetics, there’s genuine pathos in Mr. Everett’s portrayal of a man bitterly aware that his talents are unreliable armor against the perceived sin of his homosexuality.